This paper presents a new technique, called aura 3D textures, for generating solid textures based on input examples. Our method is fully automatic and requires no user interactions in the process. Given an input texture sample, our method first creates its aura matrix representations and then generates a solid texture by sampling the aura matrices of the input sample constrained in multiple view directions. Once the solid texture is generated, any given object can be textured by the solid texture. We evaluate the results of our method based on extensive user studies. Based on the evaluation results using human subjects, we conclude that our algorithm can generate faithful results of both stochastic and structural textures with an average successful rate of 76.4 percent. Our experimental results also show that the new method outperforms Wei and Levoy's method and is comparable to that proposed by Jagnow et al. [21].

In this paper, we present a new mathematical framework for modeling texture images using independent basic gray level aura matrices (BGLAMs). We prove that independent BGLAMs are the basis of gray level aura matrices (GLAMs), and that an image can be uniquely represented by its independent BGLAMs. We propose a new BGLAM distance measure for automatically evaluating synthesis results w.r.t. input textures to determine if the output is a successful synthesis of the input. For the application to texture synthesis, we present a new algorithm to synthesize textures by sampling only the independent BGLAMs of an input texture. With respect to synthesis of textures and evaluation of the results, the performance of our approach is extensively evaluated and compared with symmetric GLAMs that are used in existing techniques and with gray level cooccurrence matrices (GLCMs). Experimental results have shown that (1) our approach significantly outperforms both symmetric GLAMs and GLCMs; (2) the new BGLAM distance measure has the ability to evaluate synthesis results, which can be used to automate the conventional visual inspection process for determining whether or not the output texture is a successful synthesis of the input; and (3) a broad range of textures can be faithfully synthesized using independent BGLAMs and the synthesis results are comparable to existing techniques.